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I have a lot of music from the 60’s and they are often less than 3 minutes long and it’s so much better that way! It feels much more natural when the chorus repeats just 2-3 times in between the verses and that’s it! It ends! And if the song is good, it actually makes you want to listen to it again.

But nowadays? Nooooooooo… The chorus needs repeats several times, so instead of getting teased and wanting more, you get absolutely sick of it and want to skip to the next song before it’s even over. It’s like pop songs are just following a formula without actually paying attention to how a listener actually would enjoy the song.

Songs hovered hovered between 2-3 minutes long until the 60’s and then they gradually just kept going higher and higher. Since the 80’s, they’ve hovered over 4 minutes long.

Why were songs under 3 minutes long up until the 60’s? Because the 45 RPM (7″) and 78 RPM (10″) vinyl records couldn’t have more than 3:30 on one side! By the late 60’s, when these time-constraints disappeared, singles became longer. So why did 4-5 minutes become the standard? Probably to juice out the amount of air time a song would get on the radio. But in doing so, they make you want to change the channel, or at the very least, don’t make you want more of it!

Here are a few of my favorite songs that are less than 3 minutes long. It’s no coincidence that they’re mostly brazilian (save for one italian song) and all from the 60’s.

Doesn’t this photo look ridiculous because of all the water being used just to wash hands? But many of us have a habit of blasting the water just like this.

I just came back from this town in Mexico called Tulum where the beach-front properties are all off-grid. That means all the electricity is powered by diesel generators and all the water is trucked in.

When I got back home in LA and turned the bathroom water on to wash my hands, the water blasted open with extreme pressure that I had not experienced for weeks. I had grown accustomed to the water flow being light. So I decided that this extreme water pressure is very wasteful and should be remedied. Especially because… well, we are in a drought and everybody is talking about how we should conserve water. So here we go…

Reduce the water flow by adjusting the valve underneath your sinks

I found the little valve underneath the sink and turned it almost-off so that when I turn the water open all the way, only about 20% of the water comes out. (Note, the hot and cold faucets have separate valves.) So this takes all the thinking out of having to be mindful of not opening the faucet all the way in my home. I don’t need the pressure to be greater than that anyway. I even did this to my kitchen sink.

Look under any of your sinks and you’ll see this setup. The knob on the left is for the hot water. The one on the right is for the cold water. Turn it clockwise to reduce the flow.

Please don’t “sweep” your backyard with the garden hose

Then I noticed my neighbor was in his backyard, with the garden hose on full blast and he was taking his sweet time “washing” his backyard one foot at a time. Now that’s extremely inefficient, wasteful and quite frankly really sad. There were not even any garden-hoses in Tulum. All he needs to do is sweep the backyard with a broom.

Grass…

And don’t even get me started on those terrible lawns. All that water being used to water a plant that you cut every week so that it won’t seed? It’s not even a drought-tolerant plant! If you replaced your lawn with veggies and herbs it would require so much less water and actually produce food you can eat. Just imagine, watering plants that produce food. What a novel concept! And fruit trees, by the way, require the least water of all. So screw the obsession with the green lawn.

Water seems to be infinite but it’s not.

Here in California, we’ve had record low rainfall all throughout the state and our water comes from hundreds of miles away but people seem to forget that. Water doesn’t even seem very expensive because it’s so heavily subsidized. If water became expensive people would go crazy but I think that WILL happen sooner rather than later, and it should because the biggest motivator for people to making these changes is when it hits their wallet.

Side story: At burning man, there is this theme camp called the “Human Carcass Wash” where everyone gives everyone else a shower and all they do is use ONE STANDARD WATER BOTTLE for the entire body. The original point of the camp was to be a lesson in boundaries. You state your boundaries, have them honored, and be comfortable with either gender touching you in the washing process. The side effect happens to be that you come out feeling pretty clean. So it’s pretty astonishing how little water you really need to take a shower. That’s why I scoffed at my friend recently who bought this giant ten-inch wide shower head. (It had an output of 3L per minute so a 10-minute shower would use 30 liters or 8 gallons of water.)

Anyway, all these little changes make a difference. If everybody did what I did with the faucet, it would make a huge impact!

I’ve always wanted a YouTube channel to go hang in hand with this blog. I started doing it last year and it’s kind of cool that it’s happening. It’s not easy for me to make videos. They require an extra level of preparation and focus that doesn’t always come together to make a guaranteed, great video. I have thrown away bad takes so many times. I often have to try different lines of speech and adjusting the tripod and framing so it’s just right takes time too. And then the worst is when you take a video but the wind is all muffling it out.But anyway, I really enjoy it because it’s a lot more dynamic and I get to share fun information through video!

I noticed that since the start of the year, there has been a gradual increase in the number of views of some of my videos. Namely, the dragon flags and L-sits. On any good day, I’m getting a few hundred views of the L-sit tutorial and almost a hundred of the Dragon Flag tutorial. That’s pretty cool! And there’s an upward trend since the start of the year. I attribute it to my L-sit video being featured on fitloop.co thanks to Phi from the bwf reddit community recommending that it be placed there as the superior tutorial. Thanks guys!

And the number of subscribers (shown below) are interesting only cause it’s nice to see where the bulk of my subscribers are from in the world. They’re not always in keeping with the population, either. But I’m sure language has something to do with it, because the top four countries all know English. It’s cool to see I have 13 subscribers from New Zealand cause that place only has a population of 4 million. (The New Zealanders must love me!) To put it in perspective, Brazil has a population of 200 million (50 times the population of New Zealand) and I only have 16 subscribers (3 more than N.Z.) from there. But again, it’s probably the language barrier.

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